Robert Paterson and David Cote: Can Opera Handle Sexbots and Swinger Parties?

Photographs: Anthony Popolo, Kent Meister

Composer Robert Paterson and librettist David Cote’s Three Way is, generally speaking, about sex. Or, to be precise: sex with an android, power games between a dominatrix and her piggish client, and erotic confusion among four couples in masks and robes at a suburban swinger party. Please note: If you go expecting a night of gratuitous nudity and NC-17 recitative, be warned. Despite a couple of f-bombs and adult subject matter, these three one-act operas lean more toward humor than shock.

The co-coproduction by American Opera Projects and Nashville Opera had its world premiere in Nashville this past January. John Hoomes, CEO and artistic director of Nashville Opera, returns to direct a New York engagement at the BAM Fisher (Fishman Space) June 15-18. The cast features sopranos Danielle Pastin and Courtney Ruckman, mezzo-sopranos Eliza Bonet and Melisa Bonetti, countertenor Jordan Rutter, tenor Samuel Levine, baritone Wes Mason, and bass Matthew Treviño. Dean Williamson is music director and conductor.

In advance of their BAM engagement, we invited Paterson and Cote to interview one another about how and why they wrote such a charming opera with such a naughty title.

Robert Paterson and David Cote
Photograph: Kent Meister

COTE: Since we do our jobs in isolation — we don’t sit around the piano writing songs — I want to ask a basic question: How do you write for the voice?

PATERSON: I want it to feel good for the singer, in the sense that I don’t want to write against the voice. I’ll do it if I need to: I’ll write crazy, Berio-esque passages or Sprechstimme, you know, Second Viennese School: things that can be awkward to sing, but sound kind of cool. A lot of European music is like that these days: not vocally friendly. It’s not what I would write for arias, but I might do it for effect in recitative.

COTE: Is the goal to make the voice sound beautiful? Is it that simple?

PATERSON: I think a lot about line and how the voice works in different registers for different singers. With our countertenor, Jordan [Rutter], for his aria “Why So Shy?”, I talked with him at length: maybe this section feels a little low for you… if I transpose the notes up in the chord, it’ll have the same effect but it’ll feel better for you to sing and it will project more. I think a lot about setting the instruments around the voice so the voice has space to be heard. I want the words to be as clear as I can make them. I probably do more experimental stuff in the instruments around the voice than I do with the voices themselves.

COTE: We have a dozen arias in Three Way, and I want to drill down into one. It’s the soprano aria from The Companion, “The Perfect Man.” We needed a number for Maya to be assertive and sort of revel in owning an android lover. This is where my libretto writing intersects with Broadway musicals: It’s a classic “I want” song. Okay, so I wrote the aria text. I was happy with the lyric, I didn’t write it like a song, but it has a little bit of rhyme, and a bit of a chorus. Tell me: You get the words and you know what the situation is. How do you translate that into music?

PATERSON: Generally, I start from an overall theme. What purpose does this aria serve? What’s the emotion? When the character sings, is she secure or insecure? Is she confident, is she sad? Here are the words:

What I want is a man. Not just any man: the perfect man. Who will be here, ready and happy, At the end of every day. You may find it alarming But Prince Charming Is just an upgrade away.

I think about the rhythm of the words. “Not just any man.” Pause a little before “the perfect man,” and then “who will be here.” I think about which words should go up, which should go down, which words I would want to land on, and when you land on them, which might fall at the beginning of the bar line. “Not just any man, the perfect man.” I accent perfect a bit. “Who will be here, ready and happy,” that’s important, so I accentuate that. “Every day”: I go up on day, and then you start rhyming — alarming/Charming, day/away, so I made sure both went up. Then you have internal rhymes, and I made sure those rhythms match a bit. So the structure of the music is helping us understand your word patterns, but at the same time, it’s a cohesive musical whole.

COTE: And filling in blanks between words by creating mood and subtext. If I didn’t speak English and heard that aria, I would say the woman is hopeful and dreamy.

PATERSON: Also slightly demented! She’s singing a sweet aria about a robot, and that’s kind of twisted. I wanted to start out being very pretty, then when she sings “But he seems to think”, the music gets a little dissonant, and the chords are a bit crunchy, and I repeat the line. The point is, he’s not real, and it’s kind of creepy wanting the perfect man. Later, Dax’s aria “Broken Machines” counterbalances hers, which I love.

COTE: To me, Maya’s lust for perfection is very “operatic,” Perfection and opera have an interesting relationship; fans and experts are always seeking that ideal voice, the perfect interpretation of a great aria or the perfect score. I mean in terms of music. For libretti, it’s different. I’ve read program notes written by serious musical figures that say, Well, the libretto is ridiculous, but you need to have a bad libretto to make good opera. I don’t know if you ever heard that before.

COTE: It’s sort of like: great opera springs from the ashes of bad libretti. Which I find depressing.

PATERSON: It’s not that the libretto needs to be a great libretto. I think the libretto needs to leave room for the music to express things that only it can express and vice versa. I feel that way with our recits. I try to be conversational, because why mess with that? I don’t have to superimpose beautiful music over your funny lines, where the rhythm does its job and I can support it and make it more vibrant by constructing colorful recit material behind it.

COTE: Sure, it’s all music. There’s never not music.

PATERSON: But the arias, or transitional material, like the “silent movie” for the dominatrix at the end of Safe Word, that’s great. It’s a nice, big, lush section of music where I get to spread my wings.

COTE: This leads to a question about larger musical structures. Do you use your music to evoke place or to suggest an aural metaphor?

PATERSON: Oh yeah, we call that word painting. In “Broken Machines” I used what I call the Phillip Glass texture: it’s very arpeggiated and sounds somewhat mechanical.

COTE: And you also use that in Joe’s first aria, “What Did I Do Today?”

COTE: So far as I was writing “musically” by the structure of my libretti, I think the model we had for Three Way was: recit leads to aria leads to recit leads to duet or trio and finally, climax and resolution.

PATERSON: Yeah, or we’d use an arioso transitional moment that could be half-recit, half-aria. When we do a darker opera, we’ll have more moments where words can be fewer but equally powerful, and the music carries the action and repeats, because we’re less concerned about having laugh lines land correctly within the show, you know? Although I must admit, I like recits that are recits, and Mozart did too.

COTE: We’re not writing opera buffa, but yeah, there’s a range of conversational recit to punch lines. I totally agree with what you said: If it’s a tragic opera, less is more. I want to write an aria for you that’s twenty words long, that can go on for three minutes.

PATERSON: And sometimes if you know you’re going to repeat a sentence or a powerful phrase, it can be melismatic. Modern composers aren’t very melismatic. They don’t usually write lots of flowery lines. In English especially, they write very syllabically; they’ll set one note per syllable. Singers love singing melismatic music, drawing it out and sounding beautiful. That’s what I was getting at earlier: How it’s important to work with singers, not against them.

COTE: I’m definitely pro-virtuosic performance. Granted, you don’t make an opera by saying, I want to write something virtuosic! You want to tell a story, have characters that interest you and a dramatic conflict. But the story can be an excuse for virtuosic writing. This is a cliché hypothetical, but what if we write a scene set in an asylum, or about a person with extreme mental problems. How do you do that without making it seem silly or exploitative, using dissonance and instrumentation?

PATERSON: Right, it’s a puzzle. How much music do we need here, how many vocal effects, or things that are pyrotechnical? I’m all about the emotion.

COTE: As we both know, making new opera is risky. It’s so expensive, so hard to get produced. And most seem to open and vanish. But Three Way feels especially risky.

PATERSON: I think we took a lot of risks doing things that maybe are not considered “cool,” but which we like. Like segmenting the arias. We’re being anti-cool.

COTE: In Nashville I remember [director] John Hoomes said, “This opera is a pretty radical challenge to what’s happening in opera today.” And we did it without parodying classic or new work. Although each act is in dialogue with well-known works: The Companion owes a little inspiration from the Olympia act in Tales of Hoffmann; Safe Word has direct references to Salome; and of course, Masquerade has a bit of Cosí fan tutte and Ballo in maschera: themes of confused lovers, blurred identity.

PATERSON: Anybody who loves opera will find very clever clues in the text and sometimes in the music. In the second act, especially.

COTE: I would be thrilled if a total opera snob — some Met patron who can’t abide opera post-Puccini — saw Three Way and went, “Oh, yeah: This is opera I know.” By the same token, I really want younger audiences. Like in Nashville, remember after the last beat of Safe Word, this young woman sitting behind us?

PATERSON: “That was dope!” she said. I loved that. [Laughs]

COTE: In the last opera, Masquerade, we have the greatest range of characters from different walks of life, so I’m hoping it’s the most relatable, even if it’s, um, a swinger party. We have a young couple in their thirties, trying out multiple partners for the first time. There’s an older couple who are veterans of the scene, but they have a very conservative public persona. Then there’s a postgender, pansexual couple.

PATERSON: There was a fun moment for me, when you wrote Kyle’s explanation for what “cis male” means. I wrote this cute little arioso to feed the audience the definition, just in case.

COTE: You were right: I had to explain what “cis male” means. Masquerade was a great chance for me as a writer to see how far I could push the idea of gender and sexual fluidity in today’s world. How to make that dramatic and fun, without moralizing or resorting to manufactured drama. It would be very easy to write an opera set at a swinger party, with hetero and fluid characters in the same room: there’s tension, they drink too much, and eventually someone punches somebody. You can do that. And what are you saying? People can be bigoted. Bravo.

PATERSON: I like that you didn’t moralize and also, you didn’t take the easy way out with clichéd endings. Like The Companion. Robot stories usually end badly. The robot kills somebody or sacrifices itself. We avoided that. Then in the second one, Safe Word, you didn’t make the BDSM session look deviant or evil, it turns out surprisingly playful. And in Masquerade, we could have said, “Oh, this is all awful, and people should go back to their puritanical lives, eat a TV dinner and go to bed.”

COTE: As far as moralizing, Kyle’s aria “Why So Shy?” did come out of that impulse. I knew that in that opera I wanted to include a galvanizing anthem about sexual idealism. It didn’t end up being that direct, which is good. But I wanted to have a character declare: Until we end monogamy, until we end penetrative sex, until we end marriage, gender, man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, we will never be free! It would be a scary, fervent aria — scary because we all cling to our identities.

PATERSON: So is Three Way different from other operas or not?

COTE: I think it’s different in the sense that it’s melodic and humorous. The librettists I respect understand the value of comic relief, even in a serious opera. But this is a totally original opera of three one-acts, it’s a full night with a lot of plot twists. I like to think it’s as good as a good Broadway musical. Good music, good drama, but with the heft of richly orchestrated classical music. I want people to come see this and say, this is a piece that has its roots in classical opera, but it’s musical-theater smart.

PATERSON: I agree. I have a hard time even calling what we do opera. I want to say, “musical theater,” but then people think musicals. Ultimately, I want to say, “It’s music, it’s acting, you’ll have a great time.” Hopefully we can break down some walls.

COTE: New opera can learn a lot from musicals. In terms of pacing and storytelling. I see Broadway shows all the time, and sometimes the music itself can be really limited. Or they don’t trust their audiences enough to stray outside generic pop or show tune idioms.

PATERSON: Right.

COTE: So I guess, what? Our next opera has to be super-dissonant and all about bestiality?

PATERSON: [Laughs] I do know that with the next opera we write, I want to go down different roads.

COTE: I’m at a place where I enjoy telling stories. But I would love the challenge of writing something more severe and abstract. Just as there’s no one way to write music for an opera, there’s no one way to write a libretto.

PATERSON: I would love to have access to a bigger orchestra. I could do a lot more with color and power. You can do a lot with 12 musicians — and I think I did — but man, I’d love to have 50 in the pit. That would be incredible: two oboes, a really large string section!

Further Reading

Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, who performs nightly in the Stone series at the New School Feb. 19-23, talks with Olivia Giovetti about improvisation as conversation, and choosing to focus on meaningful work.

For musicians of older generations, to watch Face the Music handle improvisation-based works by black female composers at National Sawdust on Feb. 11 was to attempt to mute one's envy, critic and musician Jennifer Gersten asserts.

PUBLIQuartet cellist Amanda Gookin chats with Amanda Angel about "Freedom and Faith," the group’s second album, which it will showcase on Feb. 10 as part of a season-long residency at National Sawdust.